Guest Post: The Experiment Has Failed. Are You Ready?

After about an hour’s worth of air traffic congestion delays around JFK airport, I finally departed New York City yesterday evening en route for Vilnius, Lithuania… one of my favorite inconspicuous corners of Europe.

The route took me through Helsinki, Finland for a brief connection, and I was on the ground long enough to witness something truly bizarre: a complete and utter lack of people.

I could practically count on two hands the number of passengers milling around the airport this morning during peak business hours… it was almost something out of a zombie movie.

Ordinarily I would have seen hundreds, thousands of people… and I have in the past as I’ve traversed this route many times before. And no, today was not a holiday.

Helsinki’s airport functions as a major transfer point, especially for European business travelers criss-crossing the continent or flying to Asia, which makes airport traffic an interesting proxy on the European economy (though not necessarily a reflection of Finland’s).

While a single example is not enough data to draw any significant conclusions, I mentally filed the observation as another snapshot of Europe’s deteriorating economic situation.

It reinforces what I observed here several months ago when I was last on the continent in April; it was as if a dark cloud was hanging overhead, and the general mood was absolutely sour. People seemed to be capitulating all hope and starting to make peace with the fact that their economic futures have been squandered by a stupid experiment.

Of course, I’m referring specifically to the ‘euro experiment’… however the euro is merely a symptom of a much larger experiment– that of fiat currency.